Embracing the inescapable joys of sound.

Lo! – Look And Behold – Review

Lo! are a newly-spawned four-piece from Australia that quite frankly shouldn’t be making a record this good for their full-length debut. Look And Behold is an anomaly in the respect that the well-developed ideas and resulting sounds clearly match that of a band aeons into their career.

There’s little information to be found on the internet or otherwise, but the Aussies were picked up by Pelagic Records after a successful self-released debut EP last year. Musically, Lo! have the rebellious spirit of hardcore inseminated within a barricade of toxic sludge, respecting Mastodon but carefully distancing themselves from copycat syndrome with unique sonic flashes that demonstrate their intelligence.

Opening track Hath lays out intentions with a strange delusion of electronic fuzz, eventually progressing into Deluge – a track wick with scorched yelps and a Neurosis-like atmosphere. A promising start indeed.

As cliché as it will sound, Lo! are a band to be listened to with headphones or at least with some meaty decibel levels to attack the cerebral cortex. Aye, Commodore confirms this, galloping into a frantic mind-fuck of distortion, laid out with clever off-beat twists and unpredictable time-signatures. The latter – something that makes a huge difference to the album throughout.

When they revert to a more conventional thrashy structure – like in Indigo Division – they still absolutely lace through verses with an immense neurological assault of bulky riffery. Their sound will violently clutch your ear and demand attention.

But it’s not just the intensity that is irresistible – it’s the crawling, electro-ambient sections that quickly overturn the record and take you around another, very dissimilar corner. Doth breaks up the cleverly ordered chaos for over three-minutes and folds into the soft, proggy introduction of Moira Kindle.